Lost in setup mania

Dear all,
a short time after Bill moved out of his garage an operating system installation used to take half a day. Thank goodness those days are over. Today it's very quick - even with WIN11 - but suddenly it takes me two hours to un_stalk and another two hours to customize it. That brings us back to half a day. Ultimately, all inputs and clicks of these processes end up somewhere in a command buffer. It should be possible to collect all of this and store it in a script. ... ?
Best Lino L.

Welcome to the forum

There are many solutions out there, but not all are suitable.

Here is one solution, I cannot speak to it's suitability, but you may try it if you wish:

You might like this YouTube video also:

This all really depends on what you're trying to do and how much customisation you want. It seems that you're better off creating a .wim with all your customisations.

If you reinstall Windows frequently, or install onto many machines, I can understand why the amount of time to do all the customization would a royal pain in backside. In fact, that is precisely the case for me.

So, there are a lot of things that you can do to DRASTICALLY reduce installation and configuration time. Here is a small list of some of the things that I do:

1) Unattended installation of windows. Boot your installation media and literally in 5 minutes (varies from computer to computer) you can have a base installation of Windows without you having to perform a single click or respond to a single prompt.

2) If you want to take that a step further, you can slipstream all your drivers into the installation media so that all drivers will be already installed when Windows is initially installed.

3) Yet another step: Create a "Reference System" that has all the apps you want to install and has Windows configured precisely how you want. Then, save that to a Windows image that replaces the install.wim on you installation media. Now, when you install Windows it will have all your customizations, drivers, etc. already in place. Works especially well paired with unattended installation.

4) Export all your drivers before you reinstall Windows. Then, after a reinstall, ALL of your drivers can be installed with a single command or from a few clicks in Device Manager.

5) Create a Windows customization script. After installing Windows, you can run your script and it will customize every aspect of Windows to your desires and can even install all your apps for you.

Yes, it may take a considerable amount of time to experiment and determine which of these works best for and to get them all setup. But in the end, it may be well worth it. I've experimented with all of these methods (and others as well), and I've developed my own set of preferences. Now that I have it all figured out, I can stand up a new machine or VM, completely customized and with all drivers in place, in mere minutes.

Are these solutions for everyone? Heck no. I would estimate that this is useless to 95%+ of Windows users. But for those of use doing frequent installations, it's well worth the upfront investment of time.

If you have been tweaking and tuning Windows installs for as many years as I have, then you would have accumulated quite a list of Batch Files and VB Scripts to aid in installing and tweaking any version of Windows.

And, if you think the Mini 11 is great, you've not tried "Micro 11" which is even Greater. It's smaller, easier to download, faster with less overhead, and.....it comes up Activated! What's not to Love?

And the Windows Core, that's required to run Non-MS software, has not been futzed around with. All programs run just fine.

I've tried both Lite versions of Windows 11/Pro/64, and I much prefer "Micro 11" from download to final setup.
(I don't remember ever downloading such a small ISO, that went so fast, and the install went just as fast)
It's the Core of Windows 11, without all the MS BS!
All the BS that I would normally have to Delete from Windows, is already Gone!

As far as tweaking any install of Windows, I've got a whole Bunch of tweaks (thank you Shawn) on a Flash Drive for quick and easy install.
I insert my Flash Drive into a USB port, make a few clicks on a few Batch files and VB Scripts, and in just a few seconds, the tweaking is DONE!
No struggle, no strain!

Cheers Mates!
TM

TechnoMage2021 said:

If you have been tweaking and tuning Windows installs for as many years as I have, then you would have accumulated quite a list of Batch Files and VB Scripts to aid in installing and tweaking any version of Windows.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I even used vlite and ntlite, but reinstalling Windows twice a week was just too much for my taste.
I just disable everything, along with the defender evil and Windows is good to go. Nice and smooth.

65 processes / 600 threads / 23000 handles / 1,8GB RAM (1GB used by ramdisk) by default 11 has about 150 processes.
I could drop it by another 20 processes, but I use MSA, store, Edge, onedrive, etc. Time to get ready for Windows Cloud.